MakerBot Industries

This is good stuff — intrepid Thingiverse user Joakim has modeled a knob for the interior of a a legendarily rugged Land Rover Series II.  This has presumably broken after fifty years of running the vechicle in the Serengeti or somewhere equally exotic and treacherous, during one of the many ventilation changes necessary in this punishing environment.

Ok, so we’re not printing replacement camshafts quite yet, but this is still pretty cool.  After all, there are thousands of plastic parts in a modern (or, as we see here, not-so-modern) car.  Is anybody else using a MakerBot to fix them?

Extra points for including the manufacturer’s part number — well done, Joakim!

Landrover Series II Ventilator Knop by Joakim

This is part of spare part 337970 The one in the pencil square is the orignal boken one.

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The answer is “better than the original.”

Better than the original

I had first seen Ian Johnson‘s Soap Dish on Thingiverse months ago, thought “cool,” and moved on.  A few days ago I stumbled upon Ian’s Flickr photostream and finally got the full story.

This is the original soap dish from Pottery Barn. It rests in a fixture attached to the wall, from which it has fallen many times and broken. It can’t be replaced because the line has been discontinued, but I want to continue to use the fixture, since the pedestal sink doesn’t really have room for a soap dish.

Ian designed a replacement soap dish in halves, so it would fit on the MakerBot print platform and asked Will Langford to print the parts for him.  He then glued the two halves together with black ABS drain pipe cement from the hardware store, dipped the dish in an ABS cement/acetone bath to smooth out the texture, sanded it smooth, painted it with his ABS dip to give it a glossy finish, and then gave it several coats of white liquid plastic.  For more information on Ian’s exact process as well as his photos of the intermediate stages, check out his photostream.